Badang

Badang is a legendary Southeast Asian strongman. Details of the story vary slightly.

Badang was a Siamese boy from Sayong Pinang, located in present-day Johor, Malaysia. He was the only son of two poor farmers who worked hard until the day they died. As a young man, Badang worked as a coolie for the rich farmer Orang Kaya Nira Sura in a place called Salung or Saluang in Aceh, Sumatra (modern-day Indonesia). Badang was small-statured and the weakest of his group. Their job was to clear through the undergrowth to make way for new fields. As slaves, they didn't get paid and received only a few handfuls of rice each day. This was hardly enough to satisfy the hunger of such arduous work, so Badang relied on catching fish for extra sustenance. He set his fish-traps along the stream every evening and gathered the net the following morning..

One morning Badang found his traps empty. The leftover bones and scales proved that someone had eaten his catch. This went on for a few days and Badang was angry. Not only was he not getting enough to eat, his friends even laughed at his plight. Expecting this to be the doing of some wild animal, Badang armed himself with a rattan stick (or a parang in some versions) and hid in the bushes of the jungle. Drifting in and out of sleep, Badang dreamt that he was strong enough to lift a boat with all its load. He dreamt that he lifted a great big rock and threw it into the air. The rock travelled many miles and landed at the mouth of a river. In his dream Badang was very rich and lived in a palace with many servants waiting on him. His mother, father and sister wore fine clothes and lived with him in the palace. He also dreamt that he swallowed something that came out of the mouth of an ugly beast, giving him the strength to lift a rock over his head and throw it into the air.

At dawn, Badang saw none other than the demon from his dream. The beast was a hantu air, a water spirit capable of taking the form of any flora and fauna which lives around bodies of water. In some versions it looked like a short old man with long white hair. In other versions it looks deceptively fierce with tusks, horns, and hair on its chest, arms and legs. In every version it is described as having eyes red as fire, long matted hair, and a long beard covering its chest or reaching its waist.

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